The House Health Committee recently approved a measure (H.B. 1659) that would impose mandatory work requirements for all able-bodied food stamp recipients. The legislation is now being fast-tracked for consideration before the full House.

Mandatory work requirements sound reasonable … until you know the facts.

One in seven Pennsylvanians currently use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, to help buy the food they need to survive and feed their families. SNAP helps keep food on the table for thousands of low-wage and part-time workers who can’t find steady employment, veterans, people who are homeless, and people struggling with addictions, in addition to children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

“My council of economic advisors estimate that this [tax cut], along with a lower business tax rate, will likely give the typical American household around a $4000 pay raise. And that is money that will be spent.” – Donald Trump, October 17, 2017 at the Heritage Foundation’s annual President’s Club meeting.

It’s Tax Day 2018, and you know what that means? The country’s wealthiest Americans are about to experience long-term gains from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center is concerned about the effects of the tax cut law and legislation that would make temporary tax cuts permenant after 2025. A new report from the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy shows that the top 1% will receive more federal tax dollars than the bottom 60% in 47 states, and the top 20% will gobble up the

We at PBPC are engaged in a major effort to push back against legislation in the PA General Assembly to create work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP. The new federal Farm Bill put forward by House Republicans, which authorizes the SNAP (Food Stamp) program, has similar provisions.

Tax day is around the corner and many Pennsylvanians are busy gathering their W-2s, 1099s and other financial documents to submit their taxes for 2017. Meanwhile some Congressional leaders are making the case to extend temporary provisions to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which will expire after 2025. Republicans pushing for this legislation are spinning it as making permanent the benefits to the middle class. But, don’t be fooled.

A new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy documents how the extension of these so-called “middle class tax cuts” will continue to primarily benefit the richest Americans and will leave the poorest 20% paying higher taxes on average in 2026 than if the bill was never enacted.

I’ve heard these words yelled out of car windows when I marched alongside poor and homeless people fighting for affordable housing and living wage jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2000s. It’s a slogan many who have waited in lines at soup kitchens or homeless shelters have heard again and again.

Get a Job! The belief that anyone who wants to work can get a job permeates our society and has crept into the thinking in both conservative and liberal circles. But this mindset has not emerged out of nowhere – it has been constructed and refined over the last 50 years by conservative scholars, policy wonks pursuing welfare reform and right-wing think tanks (for a detailed description see Lucy Williams article, “Decades of Distortion: The Right’s 30-Year Assault on Welfare”). Alice O’Connor, in her book Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History (2002) traced the shift in the study of poverty from a focus on low wages and labor exploitation during the Progressive era to its framing as an individualized problem due to personal failings and the behavioral characteristics of the poor that culminated in welfare reform in the 1990s.

Proposals to toughen work requirements to qualify for SNAP benefits (food stamps) are all the rage. Even in areas of high unemployment, low income people without children and who are not considered disabled would be permitted to receive SNAP for only 3 out of 36 months, unless they were working 20 hours per week. The proposals are under consideration by Congress (for the Farm Bill), the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Pennsylvania General Assembly (HB 1659).

Governor Wolf’s proposed education budget finally restores K-12 classroom funding cuts (in nominal dollars) from the Corbett years, but Pennsylvania still has a long way to go to reach funding equity and adequacy.

Governor Wolf’s Executive Budget for 2018-19 proposes increases in K-12 education for the fourth year in a row. His proposal this year, if accepted, reaches an important milestone—the disastrous cuts to education instituted under Tom Corbett will be restored.

President Trump signed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act into law on December 22, 2017. While spun by Republicans in Congress as a boon to middle class Americans, as a factual matter this tax cut is a not-so-veiled transfer of income into the hands of the already wealthy, which will worsen inequality in our state and across the country.

Let’s put this legislation in context. Over the last 25 years, incomes for the very richest Pennsylvanians has been rising fast while incomes for the majority of us have been stagnant. In fact, in Pennsylvania the top 1% has captured 44 cents of every dollar of income growth since 1979 (Keystone Research Center). Low-wage workers, even those who work full time, can’t make ends meet. Meanwhile Pennsylvania has not raised the minimum wage in 10 years and many low wage workers are forced to rely on government programs for health care and food stamps.At this time of extreme inequality in our country and our state, the injustice of this federal tax legislation is shameful.

The Lamb-Saccone race in Western Pennsylvania upped the pressure on policymakers of both major political parties on trade. It expands the opportunity for progressives and progressive lawmakers to articulate and advocate for a fundamental change in U.S. trade policy in NAFTA renegotiations.